


Testimony

by Anonymous



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human Serial Killer Pennywise, Captivity, Child Murder, Gen, Hallucinations, Kidnapped Mike Hanlon, M/M, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Non-Linear Narrative, Psychological Horror, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2020-07-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:22:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25301539
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: At eighteen, Mike finally hoped to track down the Derry serial killer that has shadowed he and his friends' childhoods. The Derry serial killer found him first, though, and he's impressed with his detective skills, and he has a job for him.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Mike Hanlon, Mike Hanlon & Pennywise
Comments: 3
Kudos: 12
Collections: Anonymous, Multifandom Horror Exchange (2020)





	Testimony

**Author's Note:**

  * For [telm_393](https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/gifts).



The knife clipping against bone. The squelch of blood. The endless drone of words. Mike hunches deeper over the journal in front of him, trying to block it all out and look busy. Look interested. Look like a biographer interested in a madman. He’s tucked away in a little corner of his mind, something he carved out for himself ages ago. It resembles a clubhouse, soft rain falling on top. A rotating cast of friends, but today there’s only one, brown hair falling in his face, mouth closing around words. It’s a stupid, dangerous thing to hold onto, but he holds onto it anyway for a minute. Sometimes, like right now, when he’s being asked to 

An inane laugh echoes through the basement chop shop. “Am I boooring you, Mikey?”

Mike doesn’t respond. Doesn’t give him the satisfaction of saying that he can follow everything, that it’s still written on his nerves. Gray made him watch, once. The entire process of where the meat came from. With his hands chained to the chair while Gray did his work in the kitchen, plastic spread everywhere. Once was enough to ensure he never forgot. Those had been the early days, when Gray still relied on handcuffs rather than drugs.

Mike lets the silence speak for itself, even though he knows there’ll be a punishment for that too. Sometimes there’s a grim satisfaction in reminding Gray that he isn’t much of an entertainer. 

That turns out to be a mistake.

“Do I need to bring one of your friends over to liven things up?”

His voice drifts amiably over the sound of the knife. The threat opens up a new hole in the hole in the basement floor beneath Mike. The threat’s been there all along, unspoken, but never said plainly. That laugh lifts high. 

“That got your attention, eh, Mikey? Which one will it be?”

He can see the man towering over him out of the corner of his eye, where Mike is bent over his books, working. (You’ve got to write, Mikey, it’s why I keep you alive.”) Mike has stood face to face with him, and knows he can match Gray for height. He also knows it doesn't matter. Two years ago, when he arrived in the basement, it might have. Mike’d been well-fed and muscled from biking and doing rounds on the farm. He’s skin and bones now.

Mike imagines throwing himself against the iron door, trying to reach through, trying to get his fingers at some part of Gray, but what would that do? But the drugs hold him back, make his fingers slippery and clumsy. Slow him down. Cut the fire out of even his most intense rage. He feels removed from himself, like there’s a pane of glass between himself and Gray. It’s like being knocked permanently off-balance, constantly sea-sick and constantly unsure at the world around him, like there’s something moving just at the edges of his vision, disappearing whenever he readjusts his sight. 

Still, he manages to speak.

“You don’t have to do that. I’m already working on your book.” And in that moment, he forces his gaze up, to lock his eyes on Gray’s and to hold his gaze steady. To show none of that distracts him from being the biographer Gray has brought to live with him.

Gray giggles, and picks up the knife, sawing back into flesh, a song on his lips, distracted like a child.

__

Mike has had nothing to think about for two days since that exchange. 

_He wouldn’t,_ he keeps telling himself. Chanting it like a mantra. If Gray had really gone after one of his friends, he would have brought them into the room with him. Left them in the bed with him for him to find. Something equally disturbed. 

Gray’s gone out several times, once for a very long time. Mike can tell by the sound of footsteps across the floorboards. When he finally returns that last time, Mike can hear him descending to the far corner of the basement, carrying something heavy. Mike’s heart just about stops.

Gray knows he’s found the well. Knows he’ll check there, sooner or later.

Mike slips out of his basement room tonight, after the footsteps finally still and the TV upstairs goes from a low murmur to a lower staticky hum. 

It’s taken him a long time to find the weak spots in the walls around the room Gray locks him in. Hard trial and error, picking away at rotten boards, with meager tools, has eventually made a hole big enough to wriggle his way out of the room and into the rest of the basement.

He suspects Gray knows about this small victory and doesn’t really care. There’s no getting out of the basement, after all.

Down by the far end of the basement, the air smells of rot. He fumbles with his flashlight, and the stone well leaps into focus. Chill, clammy air settles on his skin as he puts out a hand to touch the stone. There’s an ancient ladder braced in the side of the well for anyone who wants to climb down. As far as Mike knows, he’s the only person who’s ever been crazy enough to take advantage of it. He swings a leg over, and forces himself to climb down rung by rung. It’s moist and dark and he can’t see what lies at the bottom, but he can smell it.

__

Mike’s foot touches fetid water. He forces his foot into the water, ignoring whatever brushes his ankle. He fixates on the absurd of image of seaweed to keep at bay thoughts of what it really is. Searching for solid ground, his foot presses into something soft that sickeningly gives under his weight. He jerks his foot back, goose pimples flaring across his skin, trying not to think, trying to disappear inside himself. _(The smell. Good god, the smell is going to kill him for real.)_ He steps down more carefully this time, and his foot finds the bottom of the well. 

If he ever gets out of here, he thinks, cringing at the fetid water lapping at his pant legs, he will burn these clothes.

_(If you ever get out of here you might as well burn yourself, it’s so deep in you now.)_

The smell is violating, forcing its way into his nose, his brain, making it throb. It’s going to stick to his clothes and seep out through his and pores and then--his captor will surely know, no matter how much he scrubs in the sink in his basement quarters.

_He can’t smell the death on you, he can’t tell with all the death clinging to him a panicky voice cuts in that sounds almost like Eddie, trying, in its own way, to assure him._

_It doesn't matter. A wearier voice, Stan, he can imagine, cuts in. Of course he already knows. He wanted you to check down here. He wants you to find--_

His eyes travel down. 

_Them._

The final resting place of all of his victims.

A bloated hill before him, horrible in their recognizability. A mound of plaid cotton and knit wool. He caught a glimpse of golden hair under his flashlight, soft and fair as corn silk. The body thrown carelessly on top of the pile. 

He didn’t know how old the boy was, and for a moment, he didn’t care. All that mattered was the cornsilk hair, a color none of his friends had. It was no one he knew.

The tension in his stomach uncurls a fraction. 

He spares another glance at the boy. That wasn’t entirely true, was it? He thinks back to the berry farm on the edge of town, where he ran meat deliveries once a week. The children in handsewn clothes running at his heels, all with the palest blonde hair he’d ever seen, staring big-eyed at Mike as he'd wheeled on by. None of them had ever had much to say to him, which was the best Mike could usually say for those kinds of rural families. 

Cornsilk hair. The Mayleys. A son, about 10-years old. He decides right there he doesn't need to collect any more information about the boy for his journals. He turns and scrambles up the ladder, heart pounding.

It's not until he's heaved himself through the crawlspace back into his room that he can think.

The little boy who died... Mike feels sick, but he’s grateful it’s him, and no one else. No one he loved. When he's done cleaning himself and washing away the evidence of his trip to the underground as best as he can, he collapses on his knees to the floor. Writes the boy’s surname and description in the journal he keeps under the mattress. The real record. Then turns his attention back to his work. The record Gray wants. The story of Bob Gray’s life in Derry.

__

Gray thinks he’s been at work in Derry since its founding. He’s fucking nuts, of course. But that doesn’t stop him from piling books around Mike, forcing him to pore through records of every historical atrocity that’s ever been committed on Derry’s land, a winning gleam in his eye. Like he thinks he’s being clever, leading Mike to the obvious, inevitable conclusion.

He’s a fucking crazy man with an inflated sense of his own importance and a well full of dead kids, and an eighteen-year-old (nineteen? Twenty? Mike has lost count) locked in his basement as his own personal Boswell.

_Earlier_

He returned to the mattress, fighting tears from his eyes. That was the first time he felt like he was truly cracking. Like maybe everything Gray said about himself, every crazy fucked up rambling was true. 

He lies there for what seems like a century before pulling the journal out from under the mattress and writes a sentence. 

_ The well isn’t a way out. _

His head falls back on the pillow and his throat tightens. 

Another thought forms, deeper and more terrible. Impossible to deny.

Who are they?

____

He slides down into the murky water and begins turning bodies over. Mike had thought himself inured to death and rot on the farm, but these are people. These are children, still wearing the clothes they dressed for school for the last time in.

He attempts to be gentle, moving bodies aside, offering the only respect these bodies may ever receive after death. He tries to be calm, disinterested. Cataloging age, race, facial features--what’s visible beyond the blood and dirt.

Mike’s the only one who knows what’s become of all of them. That’s what he’s being kept alive for. Mike' s being kept here to tell Gray's story the way he wants it. Or so Gray says. Who knows? What the fuck kind of serial killer wants someone to write his life story? Who kidnaps someone to tell it for him? 

_I love your work, Mikey, the way you put the pieces together in that little journal of yours, you got closer than anyone else to figuring it out--_

Mike puts his fists on the sides of his head, trying to block the horrible sounds out. For minute, he’s afraid that horrible creeping something that’s at the edge of his vision is really there and he starts spinning in the well. Breathing, desperate. He’s alone in a deep well full of bodies. Kids not so different from him, except he’s older. Luckier. 

_Unluckier._

“I need to live and tell about this,” he says, out loud, to the well. With composure. Like the kids are listening. Like they’ll appreciate the promise. He half expects a response, and oh god, he really is cracking up, isn’t he?

He forces his hysteria down inside him, where it thrums like a thousand wasp caught in a jar, with two years worth of hysteria that’s been buried and beaten and numbed into submission. He focuses on moving a body, noting down all the identifying information he can, whispering some kind of half-prayer over them, and moving on. It’s not a prayer with any belief behind it. It feels like they deserve some kind of consecration, though. So he whispers the Lord’s Prayer and Psalms 40, children’s incantations against the dark, to wish them on their way.

_This is where you’ll probably end up anyway._

Mike shoves the thought aside. So what if he does? At least this way Mike's not doing Gray’s work.

As Mike’s strength fades, his ability to move bodies gently fades too. The fear grows with every movement that a body is going to be too disturbed under the weight of his actions and at last, his fears are realized when the pile shifts and a body starts sliding down towards him. 

He needs to get out of here now.

He splashes across the well to the ladder. He’s got a foot on the rung when he curses and reaches back to grab the bobbing flashlight. His hand closes around it when the beam of light catches a flash of yellow.

Bright, plastic yellow, somehow unfaded after all these years in the muck of decomposition.

_He went out in a yellow rain slicker. It was h-his favorite._

His fingers uncurled around the rung on the ladder and his feet slipped back into the water. 

It must have been exposed by the pile of bodies that has shifted--perhaps something that was underwater this whole time but has floated up now-- _floating_ \--buoyancy unbound now that nothing is holding it down beneath that black water. He wades over to where that yellow is now bobbing freely. 

It’s the sleeve to a yellow rain slicker. Trying to be gentle, he follows the sleeve to the rest of the jacket, to what’s in it, but there’s nothing but bones now--it’s been in that well for five years. No, Mike corrects himself. Five years since Mike was kidnapped, and however long since. He's lost all track of time in the endless night of the basement. He gathers the rain slicker together like a knapsack and lifts it, as gently as he can. Maybe he shouldn’t disturb the dead, but he feels an echo of Bill’s desperation to know, to confirm, like the pain he watched Bill carry slipped under his own skin at some point when he wasn’t looking and became his too, just because it was Bill’s. 

It feels like it weighs a ton, more than his atrophied, skinny arms can handle, but it’s all in the black, fetid water that’s pouring out of the folds of the rain slicker, not in what’s left behind when the water’s drained. And what remains is a tiny skeleton, bones shifted in their impromptu excavation, so small, and so vulnerable. Mike never knew this little boy. He might have seen him on one of his bike deliveries, but he saw lots of kids, just like Bill had been just a neighborhood kid before that summer. So why does he feel like crying, like he’s failed somehow, for only being able to find a pile of bones wrapped in a rain slicker?

Because despite everything, there had been some flicker of hope Bill carried, even though he would have never admitted it to another soul. Mike suspected he was the only one who knew that he still held out hope. And here he was extinguishing that hope. 

_Don’t hurt yourself, Mike, a_ nother voice cuts in. This one calm and trusted and painfully missed. He almost turns around for a second to look for the speaker, before reminding himself that the voices are all in his head.

_Later_

He thinks back to the day he found Georgie’s body a lot. He thinks about it even more now, after his most recent trip down the well, when he found the boy with cornsilk hair. The threat of finding one of his friends has knocked loose a lot of pain that has been hiding there. About the fact that they haven’t come. About what they're doing now. He hopes they’re far away from Derry. They should be, by now. College should have taken them away. _Please let them be gone._

But there's a smaller voice, the voice of his younger self, impossible to silence or ignore, calling after them. _Please don’t leave me here._

Mostly, he thinks about Bill. Especially on days like today, when he has a new visitor. A little boy sits at the edge of his mattress some nights, staring at him with big eyes. He’s wearing a rain slicker, and waiting for his big brother to come. He's appeared sporadically throughout Mike's time here, but he's visiting more often these days. Mike can't handle it.

“He’s not coming,” Mike says impatiently. “I’m it.”

The little boy looks up at him with big eyes that can't make sense of that. “Why won’t he come? Doesn’t he care about us?”

“Of course he does. But we care about him. So we’re going to sit quiet down here and let him live his life.”

The little boy scowls and kicks at the books more insistently. Mike forces his gaze down to the paper, and tries to ignore him. 

The well and its occupants sleep uneasily. All Mike can offer them is the same thing he started out trying to offer them. Unmasking the killer. And oh fucking boy, does he know the killer now. Mike’s lived his life with him _._ Mike takes pain to note in a code written around the page what his captor tries hard to erase. The memories of the children he killed. Who they were. What they wore. When, as best as Mike can tell, they died. 

If anyone ever finds the bodies, these things will become obvious, but how likely is it? No one's ever found him, after all. So the dead sleep restlessly in their graves and Mike sleeps restlessly in his bed, and the world turns above them both, and no one ever thinks to search this house. Mike himself doesn’t even know where he is. He and Georgie are alone down here, and Bill is walking around out there, and he hopes Bill never finds out what really happened.

__

He eats the meal that Gray leaves him at the top of the basement stairs, in the little gap in the iron bar specifically made for sliding a plate through. Gray has thought of everything. 

After eating, the tide at the edge of his vision is closing in. He knows Gray’s drugging the food. It doesn’t stop him from eating. He needs the energy to stay alive. While drugged, he finds, is the most productive time to work on Gray’s “history,” as he calls it. Mike calls it sorting through a hoarder’s nightmare of books, newspaper clippings, old dental records, pages torn from Bibles, words cut from magazines, and more sinister things--stray buttons from children’s clothes, a flattened, woodcarvings of demons, blood-splattered paper airplane, a series of stills from what appear to be a 1950s clown show, mainly focused in close-up on the clown’s mouth. Sorting through it all never ends--Gray is always bringing more like it, always insisting the next piece will make sense of it all. _You’re a prancing buffoon who laughs at his own jokes and kills little kids. There’s nothing to understand,_ Mike imagines saying. 

_Going through this shit is driving you crazy._ A succinct, impatient voice in his head says. It sounds a little like Richie, if he’s being honest. _Stop looking at it._

But the historian, the would-be detective in Mike, the part of him who really hopes for some kind of answer to what Gray is, even now, can’t help but keep looking.

Gray's determined to have Mike do the job. Has given him endless journals of clean paper to write in, and an old fashioned fountain pen that looks like it costs a lot of money to write with, no matter how many times Mike insists he'd have an easier time with ballpoints or a typewriter. Gray reads his work from time to time, and his critiques are as baffling as all the rest of it. Mike has no idea what the man wants, except a story about himself, and the rough idea that Mike should be the one to tell it, but he doesn't like any of the stories Mike is telling so far.

Sometimes, he starts to see an uneasy pattern at work in the papers he’s sorting through. The juxtaposition of a cut-out magazine photo of a crying child with a deflated red balloon, pressed flat between the pages of a book about the slaughter of the first settlers in the region one winter in the 1600s makes him feel like he’s almost grasping at something just out of reach, an uneasy tip of his tongue feeling he doesn’t like.

__

Bill is right there in the room with him. He's got the remains of the slicker clutched in his hands. Bill is turning it over in his hands like its an alien object. “W-what's this?”

"Bill? What are you doing here?”

“Mike? What is this?”

Mike swallows. “It’s Georgie’s.”

"M-Mike?” He raises his eyes to the leaking walls, to the one basement window long since bricked over. “Wh-what am I doing here?"

He looks so scared, so lost, Mike can’t help but cross the floor to him, wrapping his arms around him. Bill tenses away from the touch. “D-don’t. Did you ask him to bring me here?”

Mike stares at him, the words momentarily shocked out of his mouth. “ _What?_ ”

Bill reaches out, touches his face, like he expects Mike to deny it. "Did you ask him to bring me here?”

Mike chokes under the touch. He hasn't felt anything so good in years. It feels like giving himself away.

He whispers denials that sound like apologies to the shape of the boy who he'd loved for a long time. The one whose hand he had held as he'd cried over Georgie on the first, third, fifth anniversary. “If I did I didn’t mean to. I swear, Bill.”

The stroke of his hand turns hard, the nails tightens around his wrist, and Mike struggles to pull away but he's caught, caught by the shape of the thing that is Bill. It seems to him that the thumb is too calloused and rough to be Bill's, the nails too long. The hands catch around his wrists.

“You're so pretty like this.” 

Mike wakes with a start. He's lying in his bed. Alone. He grapples for the light the lamp by his bed; the light is blinding. He sits with his arm thrown over his eyes, feeling sick. There's no Bill here, and never was.

_Earlier_

Gray was what had brought the seven of them together, that first summer they met. After Georgie Denbrough disappeared, and Ben was nearly cut open by Bowers, and Mike almost had his head bashed in by the Bowers gang down in the Barrens. They’d clung to each other like shipwreck survivors on a life raft. Kids always bond by telling stories of the serial killer who lives in the woods. This was the summer the serial killer was real. He’d got Bill’s little brother, and they’d seen glimpses of him. A white Cadillac. Balloons in the backseat. Between all the unspoken curfews and the missing posters that went up and were taken down without fanfare, they clung together. 

__

“You still running with those boys from Derry?” his grandpa asks him. Like being outside the town limits sets them fundamentally apart from Derry. Mike sighs. Knows he’s being obtuse. Of course that's not what sets them apart from Derry. He’d always hated how his grandpa never let him forget it, growing up. 

He decides to answer, and that it’s easier to just not correct him by raising the specter of Bev altogether. That’s the sort of thing that’s only likely to make his grandpa worry more. 

“They’re my friends.” 

His grandfather let a long pause fill the air. He didn’t need to say anything to let the _You sure about that?_ settle over the conversation. “You be careful with them.”

“I will.”

“I love you.”

That stops his hand on the door.

His grandfather struggles to say the words, and when he does it always comes out with some force behind it, like his grandpa needed to gather up the steam to say it. Like if he can say the words powerful enough and sharp enough and hard enough it can act as a incantation against harm. Mike marks his face in the lamplight by the kitchen table as he grasps him by the shoulders, strong, calloused farmer’s fingers digging into his shoulders, like he’s afraid some shadow’s going to pull Mike away from him. 

Leroy looks at him hard and long, and Mike feels the weight of that fear, even though he's practically a grown man now. The intensity of it all had scared Mike since long before he’d gotten an inkling of what forces in Derry his grandfather hoped to keep at bay. 

“I’ll be back before dinner,” he says. He’ll think a lot, in the coming months and years, about that choice of words. About why he didn’t just tell his grandpa he loved him too.

Mike steps out into the rain. He doesn’t come back that night. 

__

He sits down for interviews with everyone who will sit down with him. There aren’t many. 

The police can barely be bothered. The cop who sits down in front of him is aging into gray hair and sagging jowls. Former partners with Butch Bowers. If any of that gives him hope that that will make him curious about what’s going on in this town, the officer makes quick work of his hopes.

He shifts his weight around officiously, so it’s all leaning into the hands tented in front of him, thumbs impatiently tapping. A good ol’ boy smile playing on his face. He clicks his tongue, like he’s just remembered something. “Meats. You brought me twenty short ribs for the Fourth of July some years back. That was a hell of a party.”

Mike smiles stiffly, the tension pulling at his face like a headache.

“I gotta ask. Did Denbrough put you up to this? He’s the kid we usually get pestering us about this sort of thing.”

“No, sir,” Dislike knots tight in his stomach. “I’m interested in researching the Derry Killer for my own reasons.”

“Then maybe you’d know we don’t subscribe to a single killer theory.”

“Of course. But even if you just look at the number of children who’ve disappeared in the last ten years, compared to other Maine towns of our size. The numbers of disappearances of youth among the Shokipiwah tribe alone--”

“That’s well outside of Derry police jurisdiction, you’d need state police to look into that.”

“The trailer parks out by Highway 1 still fall within Derry town limits, and they’ve had more than three children go missing in the last--”

“Look.” He leaned forward. “Don’t lecture me on how to my own damn job. Now. I’d be more worried about those meats getting warm while you’re dawdling in here if I were you.”

__

Mike’s sitting alone in the library, in the corner he and Ben used to stake out together, going over the papers he collected. He’s taken over library work, ever since Ben had to start caring for his mother full-time. Graduation’s coming up. It’ll take them all away soon, and then he wouldn’t see any of them. They all had college plans, except Bev, who had a date with a Greyhound bus out of Derry forever. 

He should feel nothing but relief. They’re on the verge of adulthood, everyone but him perched on the edge of flying free from Derry forever, and they’ve made it. Others have disappeared from their class, each as strangely swallowed up in silence as the last, the wakes and vigils each more muted than the last. And Mike can’t help but feel that he’s failed in some fundamental way. That he was meant to find answers, and time is running out. 

Bill has never come out and admitted he doesn’t believe they’ll find Georgie alive, but he has stopped talking about finding him. Kids are still disappearing, the town still acts like it’s just another thing the youth of Derry need to plan around--curfews and traveling in groups are expectations, but unspoken ones: that would require admitting there was a problem. Still, everyone knows whose fault it will be if you’re out alone at night, and never seen again.

He sighs, stands. Decides to shelve the books he’s been looking at. It’s not strictly necessary, but he’ll be starting evening shifts at the library officially in a couple weeks’ time (“you practically live here already,” the librarian had said with a warm shake of the head), and he might as well get some practice in shelving materials.

He walks down to the basement. Finds and double-checks the call number on the bottom shelf, and kneels to shelve it. When he straightens and turns, he steps right into a mountain of a man. Even at eighteen, Mike’s used to being the tallest one in the room, of slouching to take up less space, but he doesn’t need to do that here.

“Well! What brings you all the way down here?” the man says. Wide cartoonish smile spreading across his face.

“Town history.” Mike glances at the books in the man’s hands before he can think better of it. “Same as you.”

A big grin cracked across his face. “Local criminal history? Like me?”

Mike felt a certain self-consciousness. Like he had any right to be throwing questions around. “Sorry I startled you. I never expect to see people here this late.”

The man shuffled, took a drag on his cigarette, which had been against the rules inside the library for a few years now, but Mike wasn’t going to be the one to tell him to put it out. “Yeah, me neither. Can’t say this is a town where I ever expect to see people taking an interest in their history. Especially the young ones.”

Mike shrugged. He wasn’t really looking to get caught up in a conversation. “I guess I’m just interested.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“Why’s that?”

“This ain’t a town where folks will open up about what’s really going on. Won’t print books about it either. Won’t find many people who will give you answers.”

Mike felt torn, he shifted his bag with the notebook and recording tape inside it, before making up his mind.

“Would you like to talk to me? About the town.”

The man grinned.

__

Mike is balancing his tape recorder on his knee as his pen moved silently across his paper. The bench outside the library is big enough for both. His new companion takes a drag off his cigarette and blows it up into the night sky. “So. Derry. All-American town.”

He taps his cigarette on the armrest and smiles a discomfiting smile. “You look deep enough you start to get the sense they need each other, towns like this and the sick fucks. Like in the wild. Herds need culling and predators need feeding.”

Mike is jolted out of his writing, mid-word. “You’re saying the town _needs serial killers_?”

He shook his head, rust-colored curls shaking slightly under his baseball cap. “I’m saying a town like this? Thinks it’s better off. Even if they won’t ever say it.”

Mike feels a curdling sickness in his stomach, starting to wonder just what he’s walked into. He eyed the man. 

“I think this killer ain’t the first to find this a welcome feeding ground.” He shrugs. “A place like this, there’s no telling how many years some monster to could act in secret. How many bodies are buried, and folks just turn away cause they don’t want to know.”

Fireflies flicker across the lawn.

“Some places just invite it. Over and over again.”

Mike has had about enough of this.

“Got to say that’s why it’s such a breath of fresh air, young man like you, coming along. Looking deeper than the surface. Seeing more than just what you want to see. Be careful with that, though. You turn over a lot of rocks in Derry, and there’s a lot of things crawling underneath.” He coughs. “Look at me. Going on.”

“That’s okay,” Mike said, barely looking up from his page as his hand traveled across the page. “So few people will talk about anything like this in Derry.”

“Well, I got nothing to lose.”

Mike closed his book. “Well, thanks for speaking with me.” He stood, then fumbled with his notebook. “Um, just to make sure I’ve got my notes right. Is your last name spelled with an “A” or an “E”?”

“A.”

“RIght, um,” Mike said, trying to check all the points off his journalistic checklist. “And would you like to go by Robert or--”

He smiled widely, and reached out his hand. Mike offered his, and felt the warm, well-calloused hand close around his, the hand grasping his tight. Holding him tight as a vice.

“Just Bob is fine.”

It was when he turned away that he felt a pinprick on his skin, like a bee sting, that he had lifted his hand to swat away before a sickening heaviness closed over him. _We’re right in the middle of town_ , Mike thinks. It’s the only protest he can muster.

__

_Mike pushes the book away from him. Fuck you. I’m not writing this._

_Finish your story, Mike. I’m giving you all the inside information you could want. You wanted answers._

_And after that, what? I’m dead?_

The words echo off the walls and the inside of his head, but if Gray ever answered, Mike can't remember it.

_Later_

He tries to read but words seem to be coming alive and writhing across the page. When Mike looks away, they’re just words again, describing the horrible desecrations union men have undergone at the hands of gangsters during Prohibition. Gray’s sorted in plenty of other shit too, stuff he insists is relevant to telling the Robert Gray story. Snippets of songs from children’s shows in the fifties, pressed flowers. The usual shit.

Most days Mike can’t tell if he’s actually being expected to put this into any order at all with his shitty fountain pen, or if the real point in it, to Gray, is torment Mike with this, with a cascade of images he can’t put together. He must be some kind of mindreader, to know nothing will drive Mike mad faster. Pieces that don’t add up. Pieces that defy order, snippets that seem to point to something longer, older, going on in Derry than Gray himself could possibly be responsible for.

Gray seems to think he’s been in Derry since time began.

Mike’s starting to feel like he’s always been here too.

__

“Did you know your friend Bill published a horror story last summer?” Gray says amiably, setting down a stack of resources. “Do you want to read a copy, Mikey? A signed copy just for you?”

  
Mike looks up with a start, his pulse pounding in his head. Georgie, who is in the room too, lifts his head, eyes charcoal black as cartoon drawings and unreadable.

  
Mike must give something away, because the uneven teeth reveal themselves as he pulls his lips back and laughs, slapping his knee. “That's an idea. Maybe I should get him here as a guest writer.” 

“Don’t you fucking dare.” The words are out before he can pull them back in. The anger slides past however many panes of glass and layers of batting to snarl out of Mike's mouth. Georgie's blank face turns toward him.

Rust-colored hair are shaking along with Gray's head. “Why's that, Mikey?” A sing-songy voice, high like helium.

Mike knows he's fucked up immediately. Knows he needs to withdraw. Play nice. He schools the anger down. Instead, he plays on the vanity that he knows lurks at the heart of this crazy asshole, the monster convinced he has some kind of opaque connection to every atrocity committed in Derry. "You don’t want a horror story. You want a history."

  
His captor had chuckled then. “And it's you to tell it, is it, Mikey?”

  
Mike forced what he thought was maybe a respectful look on his face. “If you'll let me.”

  
The moment had ended then. Another stalemate, but with another confession reliably wrung out of Mike just as surely as if he'd said the words out loud. Bill was a weakness, the weakest spot of a weakest spot. 

__

As long as he is here, he is a beacon, calling the others to his side, tempting Gray to bring them to him. He's tipped his hand, showed Gray how much Bill actually mattered to him. Mike can't allow it anymore.

"Why don't you just go home?" Georgie asks him.

Mike wants to see his grandfather again. He wants to see Bill, all of his friends, again. But he's alone, and he doesn't even have himself, not fully. He can't think clearly. Mike thinks that if he could just get the drugs that Gray is lacing his food with out of his system, that'd be a start.

__

He scrapes the next meal straight from the plate into the toilet, removing the option of giving in and eating a few hours later. Gray drugs the food every meal. Even with atrophied muscles, Gray doesn’t want to risk a fair fight with the tall young man in his basement. He’s always preferred his prey smaller and younger.

If Mike wants to stand a chance, he needs to quit cold turkey.

By the third day, he’s alternating between sweating and shaking. When he attempts to read something, the words are no longer content to crawl across the page, but are squirming off the page onto his lap. He shoves the book away and clings to the wall, feeling like it’s heaving like a ship. A throbbing pulse is bruising behind his right eye.

Georgie is back, staring at him, rain slicker dripping ink, standing in judgment over him. Mike lifts his head, forces the words out.

"I'll tell your brother where you are. I'll make sure he can bring you home."

The boy opens his mouth as if to scream, but only fetid black water, thick with putrification, comes pouring out. Behind him, Mike can see all of them, the children from the wells, pulsing like lights behind him.

The pain behind his eyes is building up like a overinflated tire. Like a balloon. The room warps around him, the children pulsing along with his head, flickering in and out of his vision, looking like images in pictures one minute and floating bodies the next.

He wraps his arms around his journal and tries to sleep.

At last, after what feels like days walking in a feverish land of sepia-toned images and dripping water, a phalanx of ghostly children pressing in on his vision, he raises his head from the mattress and it’s only himself in the basement.

Even in the dark place, he'd been dutifully sleep-walking to the door and picking up his plates. Anything less would have given the game away. But he couldn’t do it any more. Now the last plate sat untouched at the top of the stairs. Thinking of it fills him with a ravenous hunger that almost lifts him to his feet, but for the first time in he didn't know how long, the visions are gone. The swimmy borders at the edge of his sight are gone, the pane of glass between him and the world is gone. He feels wrung out, weak, but sharpened to a point. Clear-eyed. 

This is his only chance. If this doesn't work, he doesn't want to think about what Gray will do to him. 

Perhaps an hour, perhaps a day later: "Mikey? Food not to your liking?"

He hears the iron door being unlocked, and footsteps on the stairs. He presses himself against the wall. Gray walks at an easy, casual gait. A man with no worries on his mind. 

"Mikey. Come on. Stop playing.”

He looked at Gray. Looked at that big mountainous body, shark’s smile framed by rusty curls, as he entered the room.

"Not eating? Trying to get clean?” 

That made-for-clown-TV laugh, with a head thrown back too-big-to-be-real smile, like someone had carved it just a little too wide and planted a few too many teeth there.

“Come on, think, you're too weak to move like this. How’s that going to help you, when I can drug you up just as easily a different way?"

The needle flashes as Gray crosses the room towards him, kneeling beside him. 

His weight shifts over Mike, a little off balance, reaching to twist Mike’s arm to expose the soft inside of his elbow ( _Now! Now!_ The panicked chorus in his head chants). 

Mike snaps up at him like a snake with the fountain pen he’s kept curled in his hand. 

Gray takes a step back, raising the syringe, on the defensive now, but he’s too late. The sharp nib finds its home right in his side, where his flesh is paunchy and soft. Like firing an airgun right between the eyes. All the hesitation burned out of Mike by years of practice on the farm. It goes in deep, right to his fist, something warm and wet gushing over his fingers. 

The mountain that is Gray roars, twisting and thrashing. He swings the syringe in his fist at him. Mike dodges where it swings, just barely keeping hold on the pen, his weight firmly pressed on the pen still in Gray’s side. With a last burst of energy, Mike forces himself to his feet and slams Gray off his feet, mattress skidding beneath their feet. It throws them off balance, Gray toppling headfirst into the little library of horrors Mike’s been given to curate, the pile of hardcovers Mike’s dutifully stacked by the bed. His head cracking against the hard cement wall. 

Gray has gone still beneath him. Mike rolls away, chest throbbing where he feels like he got impaled too when he land on the pen still sticking out of Gray’s chest. But looking down, he’s whole, though he can feel an awful bruise forming. The blood on his shirt all belong to Gray. A pool of blood is forming beneath Gray’s side, and another under his head. Mike has some instinct to protect the books from the spread of the blood, but he resists it. He needs to conserve his energy. The syringe hangs uselessly in Gray’s limp palm. Mike wrenches it out, empties it over the mattress, and throws it across the room.

Mike thinks he could do more. Find a weapon, find a book, keep swinging until Gray’s head is pulp, but he won’t.

He's terrified to stay, terrified that if he does he will be overtaken entirely be the impulses. Like this very house itself will close in around him if he doesn't run now. He turns to Gray one last time and forces his hands into the man’s pockets until he finds what he’s looking for, coming out with keys and a handful of spare change, all the while some corner of his brain is screaming at him that Gray's hand is going to shoot out and grab a hold of his wrist and he's going to rise up laughing like it's the stinger of some godawful horror movie that Bill forced him to watch. But he's still, the pool of blood haloing around him like a corona, and when Mike stumbles past the bed this time he gets down on one knee and grabs the notebook from under the mattress. Not the crazy shit he's been writing for Gray, the hagiography for a psychopath, but the real record, the testimony of what's happened to the children he's murdered. Mike stuffs it under his shirt and staggers for the stairs, concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other, but it’s too much, as the adrenaline of the fight leaves him, and he collapses at the foot of the stairs.

He revives and forces himself to move. He does that a few times, stopping when the exhaustion overtakes him and blacking out, continuing up the stairs when he returns to himself. Gray must be really dead, he thinks, otherwise he would have caught and killed him. The journey from the basement to the front door may have taken him hours. Maybe it took days.

He remembers passing a TV blaring static on the main floor and, for the first time, getting a good look at the kitchen. He immediately wishes he'd never looked. It looks like something out of Texas Chain Saw Massacre in there, he’ll remember thinking later, though he won’t, blessedly, remember exactly what part, but he keeps moving, hands and shoulders on the wall, leaning against it, leaning close, stumbling out until he's in the cool of the night air.

It takes a few frenzied spins for Mike to realize that he recognizes where he is, and a few more to realize why. He’s right in the middle of Derry. The well-kept house on the corner of Neibolt Street. So close to where he used to make his delivery rounds it hits him like another punch in the chest. He stumbles to a gas station parking lot. Mike thinks about waving down cars, but thinks again about what he must look like. A twenty-year-old black boy, emaciated, wild eyed and wild-haired, with blood on his hands and shirt. He closes himself into the phone booth on the darkened edge of the parking lot, where a street light has thankfully burnt out, and tries to disappear into himself. He pulls out a dime from the handful of change he stole from Gray's pocket.

He stares at the phone. Considers calling 911, and telling them he'd been kidnapped, and had murdered a white man in self-defense. Weighed the odds Derry police would recognize him, believe him. He slowly lowered his finger from the 9.

Instead he calls his own phone number, the first number he ever learned, wired in his brain along with how to ride a bike or his own signature. His throat catches tighter with each ring.

On the fifth ring, a tired, elderly voice answers the phone. 

Mike releases a breath. "Grandpa?" his voice shakes, barely able to keep it together. "It's me. Mike."

__

It's taken Mike a few days time to fully grasp that he's come back from the dead. He was declared dead three weeks after his disappearance two years ago, when they dredged Derry's river and found the body of a young black man in it. Presumed bike accident, drowning. Now the police are looking into it, trying to determine the man’s real identity.

His grandpa buried his son, and then buried Mike.

Mike’s grandpa has always had steel in his bones for as long as Mike has known him, but looking at him now, gazing at him with watery eyes across the hospital bed, he looks not just old, but frail. Mike feels a shot of shame for his part in this. In making his grandpa so old. When he was always sturdy, so steady. He’s ashamed of what he's put his grandpa through.

When he got the phone call from Mike that night, he was calm, frail hands or no. He paused for a long time, then said crisply, “I never believed you died.”

Now that the two of them are here, face to face, Mike doesn’t know what to say. How to apologize for what he’s put his grandfather through.

His grandpa sees him trying to form the words and shakes his head, and grabs him fiercely. There's still fire in the way his grandpa pulls Mike towards him and holds him tight, and Mike puts everything he has into hugging him back. That seems to work better than words, for both of them.

__

Mike's sleeping, drifting, dazed. He begged his grandpa to go home before it got too dark to drive, and his grandpa relented. But the chair his grandpa had been in is occupied. At first his eternally wary brain thinks it's Gray, then that it's Georgie, but it looks like neither.

“Hey,” Bill says, shifting out of the arms-crossed slouch his been dozing in, blinking sleep out of his eyes. “It’s g-good to see you.”

He’s like a vision out of a dream. Mussed clothes, still lean, still short, a trace of stubble darkening his cheeks, making him look ten years older than the last time Mike saw him.

“Jesus. Bill. It's-”

"A miracle." Bill winces a bit. "Is what they're calling it. I-it’s news everywhere. That you’ve been alive this w-whole--” He looks in danger of choking on his words altogether, so he stops, and starts over, carefully. His eyes on Mike’s, searching. “The others are coming, too. F-flying or d-driving. I was closest.”

Mike’s head falls back. Nods. Of course. That all makes sense. He feels a pinprick of gratitude that Bill came, that he cared.

He wants so badly to stay in this moment of happiness, but he has made a promise, and he intends to see it through, and if he carries it for one moment longer he thinks he will crack for real.

“Bill, I have to tell you--when I was being held in there, I found Georgie's body. He's gone. He's been gone a long time. I promised to find you an answer if I could, and I… I’m sorry it couldn’t be the one you wanted.”

"What?" Bill says, his eyebrows drawing together, as he pulls back to get a better look at Mike. 

"I know it was him, he was still wearing his rain slicker. I'm sorry I couldn't--" What... save him? Mike hadn't even known Georgie when he had died. Why did he still feel the guilt of being the one survivor? The one who'd plumbed the rotten depth of Bob Gray's Derry and made it out alive?

He stared at the blanket, pulling at a loose thread. He felt a pair of arms slip carefully around his shoulders and a head rest upon his shoulders. He froze. Was this another figment of his imagination--? But the warmth from Bill's body was real and the pulse of his heart against his own pounding chest made his breath catch. "You don't have to--"

"You're b-back. I never thought I'd g-get you back.”

His chest tightens under the weight of the warmth against him. He can’t stand the closeness. It’s too much. Too real. Too much grace. Too much of what he wanted.

Bill pulls away, looking mortified. “I’m sorry. I should have asked.”

“It’s okay,” He says, breathless. “It’s just going to take some time to trust. That you're, ah, real.” 

Bill lets out a choked little laugh, then looks mortified with himself. “You don’t have to talk about it. Any of it. But if you want to.”

“I do. And I want you to read me your horror story sometime.”

Bill blinks at him. “You know I wrote a horror story?”

Mike nods. “I do. And I'll be mad if you don't read it to me while I'm laid up here." Is this what it's like, being back in the world? Talking with a friend? Joking? He feels a giddy kind of amazement wash over him. "I wrote something too. While I was in there. I’m not sure if it makes sense, but… maybe it’ll help? I tried to keep a record.”

“Sure I'll read it. Of course.” Bill's looking at him with something like wonder.

Mike feels a wave of relief. He tightens his grasp around Bill’s hands, and the way they grasp at each other’s hands reminds him of the way they’d grasped at each other’s hands in the dark as kids in the clubhouse. Unashamed. The fleeting pulses jumping under each other’s touches. 

Mike considers that, turns it over in his head. "Okay," he whispers, letting his head fall back against the pillow. Their hands remain clasped together even when Mike finally drifts off into a dreamless sleep.


End file.
